


let's break it (just because we can)

by MaryPSue



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Gratuitous Use Of Second Person Perspective, Literary Fiction Bullshit, Suicidal Thoughts, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 17:45:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12304350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: Like father, like daughter.





	let's break it (just because we can)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! Guess what! It’s more of my bullshit!
> 
> Content warnings for suicidal ideation and canon-typical alcohol abuse. I still haven’t seen S3, so just pretend anything canon-noncompliant is happening somewhere else in the theoretically-infinite multiverse. Someday I’ll actually watch shit when it airs.

It’s got a white picket fence.

Sure, the house itself looks like some kind of giant house-eating alien shat it out after a particularly difficult digestion. Sure, the yard has apparently been used to store dead cars for the last millennium. Sure, that fence is faded, warped with age and rain, rotted out or broken in places and, in a big chunk out front beside the gate, fallen right down flat. Doesn’t matter. It’s still a white picket fence.

Love’s a little like cocaine. It’s great at the beginning, an overwhelming rush. It turns you into somebody better, smarter, cooler. Somebody else.

“It’s got a little white picket fence,” she says, and she’s a little bit in love with it already, and you’re so in love with her that yeah, maybe you’re a little bit in love with it too.

And that’s why you make the mistake of thinking -  _yeah. this could be good._

…

“Hey. Beth, isn’t it?”

Beth looks up. The girl who’s sat down across from her and is currently leaning across the library table like she wants to leap over it shakes out her mane of honey-blonde curls, smiling. Her hair gleams like burnished gold under the fluorescent lights, and Beth has to stop herself from self-consciously winding a strand of her own brittle, bleached hair around a finger. She wonders, briefly, if her roots are showing.

“Yeah?” she asks, and the other girl’s smile grows brighter. Heather, Beth thinks, or maybe Jennifer? The other girl’s so often part of a group of equally tan and beautiful people, it gets hard to tell them apart.

“You’re the one who told Lucas that your dad is out of town touring because he’s a rockstar?” Heather-or-maybe-Jennifer asks, leaning in closer like she’s sharing some scandalous secret. She smells like vanilla. Beth leans back in her seat.

“Sounds like me,” she says. She doesn’t know which one of the golden boys Heather-or-maybe-Jennifer hangs around with is Lucas, and frankly, she doesn’t care unless he wants to buy weed.

Heather-or-maybe-Jennifer looks gloriously confused for half a second, before the smile returns full force.

“We’re having a bonfire Saturday night,” she says. “Out by the point? You can come if you want.”

Beth leans forward, until her forehead is nearly touching Heather-or-maybe-Jennifer’s.

“You’re just inviting me because you think I can get you booze, right?” she asks.

The look on Heather-or-maybe-Jennifer’s face says it all.

Beth basks in Heather-or-maybe-Jennifer’s discomfort for a moment longer before leaning back in her chair again, crossing her arms and tilting the chair back on its back two legs. “Make a list of what you want and tell me what time to be there.”

Heather-or-maybe-Jennifer breaks out into a relieved smile, pushes herself up out of the seat across from Beth, and heads back over to the table where her people are waiting. Beth waits until she’s sure they’re not looking before she lets her chair fall back to the ground and buries her nose back in her anatomy textbook.

…

The fence is easy to fix. The house takes more work, but eventually you’ve got it looking less like a gigantic turd and more like an average human dwelling. She plants flowerbeds under the front windows. Ninety percent of everything she puts in there dies, but it’s the thought that counts. 

She's beautiful. The baby, when she arrives, is beautiful. Your home is beautiful. Your life is beautiful, and perfect, like a Norman Rockwell painting or one of those collectible china figurines old ladies like to keep around their houses. It's perfect. It's beautiful. It's so far removed from anything you recognise as 'real life' that it scares you.

You never claimed to be perfect. (Just cooler. Smarter.  _Better_.) And love's a little like cocaine. It keeps taking more and more to get you high. 

...

“I don’t get why it’s supposed to be such a classic, anyway. It’s just some jerk acting all superior and whining about how much his perfect life sucks.” Heather (or maybe Jennifer) sits back on the log, tossing her bush of curls over one shoulder. The firelight-shadows turn her laughing face grotesque. “The only way this book could possibly be as good as everybody says it is is if Holden gets punched on the last page.”

“Hey, you just don’t get it,” the polo-shirted young Adonis that Beth thinks is Lucas protests, withdrawing the arm he’d wrapped around Heather-or-maybe-Jennifer’s shoulders.

“What, because I’m a _girl_?” Heather-or-maybe-Jennifer teases, poking possibly-Lucas in the middle of the chest with one finger, and possibly-Lucas shrugs.

“I’m just saying, it’s a novel about the fundamental pathos of existence and the inescapable sadness of the human condition,” possibly-Lucas rattles off, like he’s reading it from a textbook, and Heather-or-maybe-Jennifer bursts out into a fresh fit of giggles.

“Oh shut up, Mr. Winters isn’t here to see you kissing his ass.” She gives possibly-Lucas another halfhearted shove in the middle of his chest, before leaning in to rest her head there, still giggling. “Don’t worry, you’ll still get that letter of recommendation to Harvard if you admit that Holden Caulfield is a giant jerk.”

Possibly-Lucas just laughs, and nuzzles his face into Heather-or-maybe-Jennifer’s hair. Beth takes another sip from her can of soda, stares into the fire. It’s kind of fascinating how the burning logs don’t seem to visibly change, even while they’re being consumed.

“Ugh, what are you two, _teachers_?” the dark-haired girl who might be named Jennifer complains, from the other side of the bonfire. “We should be having _fun_ , not talking about stupid Catcher in the Rye.”

“She’s got a point,” Heather-or-maybe-Jennifer giggles, through a mouthful of hair.

Possibly-Lucas nods, and then calls, “Hey! Beth! Truth or dare!”

Beth stares into her drink. On her desk back at home, the latest module for the correspondence course she’s taking on organic chemistry is sitting, waiting. She can’t think of anywhere she’d want to be less than here.

“Dare,” she says, to her soda.

…

The show’s in the shitty basement of a shitty dive bar and, looking at the crowd, you think you’ll be lucky if you can play two sets and get out of here without anybody chucking a Molotov cocktail at the stage. 

You told her things were picking up. That you had some real promising prospects on the horizon. That you’d let the fading dye job grow out. That you’d get a real job. Take out patents on some inventions, sell them to the highest bidder. That at the very least you’d start playing some places that actually paid. Weddings, and shit.

You didn’t exactly lie.

But here, tonight, it’s cheap beer and bad weed and stony glares and a bassline that thrums like a heartbeat. Here it’s a dusty spotlight and a guitar that you play like you’re making love to it, because maybe, maybe it’s the only lover who’ll ever understand you. Who’ll never chain you down.

( _there’s a difference between fucking and making love. you think maybe you’ve only ever done the second one onstage, with a screaming crowd and a guitar._ )

You promised her. You  _promised_ , and the baby needs new clothes and shit and the upstairs toilet hasn’t worked for a month and the fence is starting to fall down again but here you are, in a shitty basement, playing a shitty punk show. Because you need this. Everything back home is glossy and pastel and  _perfect_ , and you just need this one goddamn thing in your perfect fucking life that still feels raw, still feels broken, still feels real.

She catches your eye halfway through the second set. Headbanging along, like your shitty garage band is the fucking Stones or some shit. Cherry red mohawk nearly a foot tall, bleeding hairspray in shining trails down her face. Almost looks like she's crying. Like agony. Like ecstasy. Like you're playing her and not just the guitar.

You think, afterwards, that it's the best show of your goddamn life.

...

Somebody brought a boom box. Somebody brought hot dogs. Somebody brought half the football team, and the cheer squad, and somebody thought it would be cool to see how big they can build the fire.

Beth can feel the heat of it on her face from five feet away, can feel the cold of the sea air on her back. It’s almost cold enough that she wants to put her top back on. Almost, but not quite. Besides, the beer really does warm you up from the inside out.

(It’s a lie. Just like the confidence it fills her up with. It’s just blood rushing to the surface, losing body heat to the air even as it makes her feel warm. She could get hypothermia and die like this, and never even know she was cold.)

She sways, in time to the music, bumping hips with dark-haired probably-Jennifer-unless-that’s-Heather, spinning to stand face to face and letting her hips swivel with the beat. Probably-Jennifer’s wearing some kind of lipgloss that sparkles in the firelight, her lips full and slightly parted, her eyes half-closed. The fire is scorching hot and the beer is a warm glow in Beth’s veins and everything is soft, is distant, is safe.

Probably-Jennifer doesn’t even seem startled when Beth goes in for the kiss, just puts her hands (so warm, almost burning) on Beth’s hips and pulls her closer. It just feels natural, inevitable.

The cheers and hoots from all around them are the only reminder that it’s not.

Probably-Jennifer pulls back, flushed and grinning, a few strands of hair sticking to her glitter lipgloss.

Beth pulls away, from her, from the fire, and starts to tug her top back on.

…

You ditch your friends after the show and catch mohawk girl at the bar. Same old song and dance - buy her a few drinks, take her back to the van or the motel or her place, fuck her brains out, never see her again. Except something goes wrong somewhere and instead of taking her someplace where the two of you can get a little privacy, you end up at an all-night breakfast place. Maybe it's the looks you got from your two best friends, the only two other people in this vast, cold universe who've always had your back before. Maybe it's just that this is how you met the woman who's now your wife.

"We - we gonna fuck or what?" you blurt, as soon as that thought crosses your mind, and mohawk girl looks up like you just blasted an air horn in her ear.

"What, right now?" She waves her fork at her half-eaten waffle. "Can I finish this first?"

"Nope," you say, putting down your own fork with a clatter and pushing yourself out of the booth, crossing your arms over your chest and wishing you'd worn something with a little more intimidation factor than the navel-revealing neckline on this shirt. "Limited time offer. Take it or leave it."

Mohawk girl looks from you, to her waffle, back up at you again. She doesn't get up.

"Fine," you say, wishing you had something to throw, or shove, or smash, or slam.

Mohawk girl watches at first as you storm out of the restaurant, but by the time you reach the door, she’s gone back to her waffle.

...

The light and the heat and the music start to fade as Beth walks along the beach, her feet sliding in the sand, clutching her arms against the chill. There’s just enough of a breeze to ruffle her hair and raise goosebumps on her arms. She can’t quite feel her hands, and she’s not sure if it’s from the beer or the cold.

Everything seems very dark, at first, close to the bonfire. It's nearly impossible to see anything the firelight doesn't touch. Beth almost trips over a couple lying in the sand, in the middle of moving from making out into something else entirely. She shuffles farther away from the ring of firelight and from the rising moans of the couple she just left behind. The water is black as ink as it laps at the shore, and there doesn’t seem to be a horizon out there. Just endless void, as far as the eye can see and farther. Nothing and more nothing.

Beth wanders around one of the bigger rocks that dot the beach, shivering in its shadow as it blots out the firelight, and there is the sky.  

…

You don’t go home.

You don’t go back to the bar where your friends are almost definitely getting plastered, either. Instead, you get in your rustbucket of a car and start it, and then sit there, with the engine running. Trying to decide where to go, when you’ll have to be home by morning. Wondering idly what would happen if this falling-apart piece of shit you call a car had malfunctioned somehow and the tailpipe was plugged.

The radio’s on your favourite rock station, blaring “Highway to Hell”. You growl a little under your breath and wrench the knob, flipping feverishly through the stations until you find some mindless, banal pop song, and then throw the car into drive. It doesn’t really matter where you go. You just need to  _go_.

The sky overhead is dark and endless and strewn with stars, an infinity of possible worlds, possible lives. If you didn’t know better, it would be beautiful. Awe-inspiring. Just plain inspiring. That eternal tableau of untamed _possibility_. If you didn’t know better, you’d believe that anything could be out there. That anything could happen. That you could _be_ anything.

But you know better.

The pop song bops along for about thirty seconds before its polished, prepackaged bubbliness finally gets on your last nerve and you turn the radio off.

...

The ocean is a silent, freezing mirror, replete with the reflected cosmos.

The tide is loud, here, the muffled bass of the music and the occasional shout the only sounds from the bonfire that carry back to Beth. She looks back over her shoulder, sees the fire. From right beside it, it had been so big and bright and hot that it had seemed to fill the whole sky. She’s barely walked for five minutes, but looking back, it already seems tiny, dwarfed by the ceiling of endless, limitless stars. So insignificant. So infinitesimal.

…

The house is dark, the sky is going grey around the edges, by the time you pull back into the drive. You clip the corner of your white picket fence on your way in, knock the corner post askew. The fence lists like it’s almost as drunk as you are.

You kick at it on the way to the door, misjudge the distance. 

The lawn’s slick with early dew, and you barely avoid faceplanting into the flowerbed by overbalancing and landing flat on your ass instead.

…

“Hey, you’re – Beth, right? Beth Sanchez?”

The voice breaks the quiet rhythm of the tide lapping gently in and out, and Beth jumps. She hadn’t heard anybody coming up behind her, lost in the star-studded expanse of forever. She realizes, for the first time, that her feet are freezing. “Yes. And yes, I did take my top off, and yes, I did kiss a girl. No, I won’t repeat either performance unless you bring me another beer, and even then, no promises.”

The boy standing back on the beach stuffs his hands in the pockets of his knee-length shorts with forced casualness, looking anywhere but Beth’s face. “Actually, I recognized you because I think we have chemistry together.” He turns his head to grin at her, pulling both hands from his pockets to point in her direction like he’s waiting for her to laugh at his incredibly witty punchline.

It takes Beth a moment to process. “Third period, right? You’re the guy who’s always asking about covalent bonds.”

Covalent bond guy deflates a little, shrinking around his smile. He stuffs his hands back in his pockets, shuffling over to where the water laps at the shore. “Jerry. It’s Jerry. What’re you doing all the way out here, anyway? Party’s back by the fire…” The way he says it is almost more of a question than an invitation.

Beth turns back out to the ocean. “Did you want something?”

“Well, I saw you walking away from the bonfire, and, I don’t know, just wondered what you were up to.” He shrugs. “With…your…bare feet in the water. Isn’t that cold?”

“You get used to it,” Beth says.

“Well, if you say so,” covalent bonds guy – Jerry – says, and then there’s a rustle and the scrunch of sand underfoot, and his voice coming up behind her. “Perfect night for a little _oh holy fuck that’s cold_.”

Beth can’t help but smile as he dances back along the beach, away from the surf, like the soles of his feet have been burned. “I tried to warn you.”

“What are you, a _polar_ bear?” Jerry grasps his upper arms, hunching over shivering, his skinny chest glowing pale in the dim starlight.

“Maybe,” Beth says. “I mean, there might be some polar bear DNA in there. I _was_ grown in a lab.”

Jerry stares at her like she’s just grown a second head.

“You’re joking, right,” he says, and Beth just grins. “Ha. Hilarious.”

“Almost as good as your chemistry line,” Beth shoots back.

Jerry lets out a discontented huff, and thankfully, finally, shuts up for a couple of seconds.

“Well, I guess skinny dipping is out,” he says, just when Beth is starting to relax again. “What a beautiful night for stargazing, though.”

“There’s no moon,” Beth agrees.

Jerry nods, and for once, says nothing, looking up instead. There’s something a little wistful in his expression, and Beth catches herself thinking that he’s not actually bad-looking, as generic teenage boys go.

“Don’t nights like this just make you want to be in love?” he asks, without looking at Beth, and if he gets any more blatantly sappy Beth’s going to drown him.

“Most of those stars died trillions of years ago,” she says, maybe a little less sharp than she intended, because Jerry looks at her and smiles.

“Not for us, they didn’t,” he says, and holds out a hand in Beth’s direction.

There’s smoke on the salt breeze and the distant sounds of laughter. Overhead, the stars glitter cold through the atmosphere.

_Oh, what the hell,_ Beth thinks, and starts to wade up out of the surf. _What’s the worst that could happen?_

…

Your daughter’s asleep, her tiny chest rising and falling peacefully, her little fat baby face wrinkled up in a frown. She hiccups loudly as you turn to leave the nursery, and you freeze, holding your breath. She doesn’t cry, though, just looks through you with those enormous eyes that you’re biologically programmed to find adorable, before blinking them closed again and turning her face away. Her tiny thumb finds its way into her tiny mouth, and then she’s fast asleep again.

You exhale, and try not to trip over anything as you creep back out of the room.

The lamp on the bedside table on your wife’s side is lit, but she’s passed out with her face smooshed into the pillow, a book half-sliding out of her grip. You think about taking it from her and putting it on the bedside table, decide against it. You’d only wake her up.

You strip, as quietly as you can, and only stub your toe on the nightstand once before turning out her light and falling into bed beside her. The dark and the quiet settle down on you like six feet of black earth, thick and suffocating.

Your last conscious thought is that love’s a little like cocaine. Even when you know it’s killing you, you still can’t quit.


End file.
